Till Debt Do Us Part

And fiscal self-control is more difficult today than in the past, when sidewalk barkers didn't boast "six months same as cash" and "no money down, no payments for a year." Consumption has been elevated to an art form, complete with megamalls, personal shoppers and stores that sell containers to hold more stuff.

Shopping is an act of affirmation and affiliation, a communal sport, a weekend pastime, an addiction and a designation in DSM-IV, psychiatry's diagnostic directory. In a media-saturated era, money buys both self-fulfillment and social acceptance—a lifestyle in which wants are transformed into needs. We come to believe that we are entitled to what those around us seem to have, and somehow spending $20,000 for a sofa appears perfectly normal.

"Some people are committing financial infidelity by hiding financial misbehavior," says Denver's Stanley. "Others are having an open affair with material wealth. That represents an alternative relationship that is undermining the quality of the marital relationship." The pressure on people to produce and to make money has become enormous. "Those who can do it are so busy doing it that they don't have much time to be in relationships," observes New York psychiatrist John Jacobs.

Seductive as materialism is, it's having a devastating effect on couples. It's creating an epidemic of people who are never satisfied. "Once you're married, if you feel you don't have enough, it's very easy to blame your spouse," says Jacobs, author of All You Need Is Love and Other Lies About Marriage. It's a logical consequence of the romantic belief that a spouse is supposed to complete us.

"Women complain that their husband has failed to provide the kind of support they expected, or that they have to work and don't want to," Jacobs reports. "Men complain that women demand too much of them and aren't carrying their fair share in the relationship. The disappointment drives a wedge between them."

Gina makes $50,000 a year, and her husband, Hank, makes two to three times more. They live in an area where the cost of living is so high that they haven't felt flush enough to fix up their home in more than a decade. Gina feels their unpainted house makes her look like the poorest person on the block and sees that lack as her husband's fault. Feeling attacked and resentful, Hank stands firm in his insistence that they don't have any money to spare for home-improvement projects. Jacobs encouraged Gina to approach Hank without blame. To her amazement, when she asked, "Honey, could we spend $6,500 to paint the house because it is very important to me?" he agreed.

"We're in an era of negotiated marriages, where we have to figure out how to respectfully deal with each other's differences," Jacobs says. "It can no longer be, 'My way or the highway.' This new kind of partnership, though it's clearly the better way to live our lives, isn't easy to achieve. Many people don't know how to win as a couple rather than for themselves." Hence the urge to stash away one's own earnings: A spouse becomes a potential drain on resources, not a partner in a long-term strategy.

Bait and Switch?

More than 60 percent of wives work outside the home, and both men and women are accommodating to this fact. Surveys show that men are taking on more of the household and parenting chores (although not yet half) and that couples are enjoying the higher standard of living that dual salaries provide. The majority of husbands, in fact, say they wouldn't mind if their wives earned more than they earn (nearly a third of working wives already make more, with another third earning around the same). Some men even admit to evaluating earnings potential in a prospective spouse, a sentiment unthinkable a few generations ago, when a working wife was an aberration, not a value-added proposition.

Outright economic gender reversal, in which a wife outearns her spouse substantially, can feel like a very subtle form of fiscal betrayal. Modern couples are the products of thousands of years of socialization that teaches us that it's the man's job to provide and the woman's job to stay home and be cared for and protected. "No matter how much we acknowledge that we want the world to change," Jacobs says, "it's still inside all of us."

If both spouses are perceived as giving what they can to the marriage, earnings may become just a part of a larger whole. But if one person feels that he or she is putting forth all of the effort and bearing all of the responsibility, resentments may fester and the off-kilter relationship is likely to crash.